CHAPTER XLVII.
THE BLACK SATURDAY.
Yet turn ye to the eastern hand,
And wae and wonder ye shall see;
How thirty thousand Scotsmen stand,
Where yon rank river meets the sea.
There shall the lyon lose the gylte,
And the leopards hear it clean away;
At Pinkycleuch there shall be spylte
Much gentil blood that day.
Thomas the Rhymer.
The dawn of the next day, the 10th of September, 1547—by the Scots called, the Feast of St. Finian, by the English and others the Festival of St. Nicholas of Tolentino—was singularly beautiful. When the sun arose from his bed beyond the eastern sea, the waves rolled and glittered in amber light; the spray seemed to rise and fall in showers of snow and diamonds upon the rocky bluffs; while the dew of the past night lay heavy on every leaf and shrub. Between its green and far-stretching shores of yellow sand and opening bays, of mountain slopes and brown basaltic rocks, its grassy isles and covered headlands, the Forth lay almost waveless like a sea of gold, and receding far away as the eye could reach, until it melted into the eastern horizon, where cloud and wave were blent together.
The fertile hills and upheaved bluffs of Fife were tinted by the glory of the morning with saffron and purple, though mellowed by haze and distance; while the capital, with its castle, its steep ridge of towering mansions, St. Giles's tower, and Arthur's rocky cone, stood clearly forth from the deep unbroken blue of the west. As the sun rose higher, seeming to mount into heaven, through successive bars or horizontal lines of vapour, which turned to glowing gold and purple, the beauty of the morning increased, for it exhibited one of those glorious arrangements of massive cloud and blazing sunshine, brilliant light and sudden shadow, peculiar to the lowlands of Scotland.
Cleared of the grain, which was now stowed away in the vaults of baronial towers or of fortified granges, or else consumed by the flame and the troop-horses of the foe, the fields were bare now, and yellow stubble covered all the upland slopes, from the margin of the sea to the lonely Lammermuirs. In some places, the plough that lay now rusting and disused, had already been at work, and had turned up the long, brown furrows, above which the ravening gled and the black corbie, as if scenting the battle from afar, were wheeling in lazy circles. Westward, beyond the Esk, the stackyards were full of yellow grain, and along the river's bank, and among the old coppice that shrouded Pinkey House, Wallyford, and the Templar Hospital of St. Germains, the leaves were assuming those varied tints of orange, russet, green, and brown—the beautiful, but fading hues of the Scottish forests in autumn.
Such was the aspect of the morning and the scenery, when, on this Saturday in September, 1547, Florence Fawside reined up his horse on the slope of Inveresk Hill, and saw before him the whole arena of a battle-field; whereon manoeuvred the far-extended and glittering lines of more than fifty thousand Scots and Englishmen, prepared for mortal strife! And this was to gratify the mad ambition, of Henry VIII., who, from his deathbed bequeathed, like the first Edward, to his successors, the hopeless task of attempting to humble a free and warlike people.
The English had first begun to move about dawn, by sending some of their artillery to the summit of Inveresk and to Crookstone Loan, from whence they could play upon the camp of the Scots, towards whom their whole force moved in three great columns, Warwick still leading the van; Somerset led the second column, and Lord Dacres the third, or rear-guard; but on coming into the fertile plain, amid which the little stream named Pinkey Burn, flows through a cleuch or hollow, the English were astonished to find that the Scots, with singular imprudence, had accepted the duke's challenge, and left their strong position, to meet his better-trained and well-appointed army in the open field.
The regent of Scotland had unwisely mistaken the first movements of the English for an intention to seek safety in flight, by a precipitate retreat from the sands of Musselburgh on board their fleet. Alarmed lest they should thus escape, after their unwarrantable hostilities, and the devastations committed on their northern march, he resolved at once to cross the Esk, and get between them and their shipping, so as to cut off all chance of their retiring towards the sea. This movement he resolved to execute in defiance of the advice of the most wary and skilful soldiers in his army, which was armed almost entirely in the fashion of the middle ages, with lances, bows, swords, and battle-axes; while the English had many of the more modern appliances of warfare in the hands of their well-trained and veteran bands of Spaniards, Germans, and the garrisons of Calais and Boulogne, all of whom carried arquebuses or hand-guns.
The Earls of Arran, Huntly, Angus, and Argyle, on this day appeared each at the head of his division, sheathed in full armour, wearing above their cuirasses the Order of the Thistle, together with the Collar of St. Michael, which they had received from Francis I., two years before. Each wore around his helmet an earl's coronet, from the centre of which, beneath a plume of feathers, rose his gilded crest; thus, the first carried an oak-tree; the second, a stag's-head; the third, a salamander vert amid flames of fire; and the fourth, the wild boar's head of the Campbells, showing its ghastly tusks above his polished vizor.